Farewell, Mr. Baseball

Bob Uecker followed up that line, that incredible line, the funniest line ever uttered in any Hall of Fame speech—which, by the way, he ad-libbed along with the rest of the speech—with eight seconds of deadpan silence and let the laughter build all around him. That’s how it was his whole life. Laughter always built around him.

Nobody in the history of American sports could deliver a line like Ueck.

He hit .200 for his career—matching, as he often said, the average of another all-time sports legend, bowler Don Carter.

He set the big-league record for passed balls—“and,” he added, “I did that without playing every game.”

He was traded three times in three years. The first time he was traded, Milwaukee to St. Louis in April of 1964, the legendary Branch Rickey was a Cardinals consultant and personally tried to veto the deal. This is absolutely true. But Bing Devine overruled Rickey, and the headline in the paper was “Braves Swap Bob Uecker for 2 Cards.”

You can almost hear Ueck say, “But at least one of those was a Bob Gibson card.”

Those Cardinals came from 11 games back to win the pennant, but Ueck did not play in the World Series.

“I was on the disabled list,” he told Bob Costas and Joe Morgan in the booth during Game 6 of the 1995 World Series.

Costas: Fouled to the screen. Why were you on the disabled list?

Uecker: I got hepatitis.

Costas: Swing and a miss. How did you get hepatitis?

Uecker: The trainer injected me with it.

Line after line. Story after story. Laugh after laugh. It was Johnny Carson who nicknamed Ueck “Mr. Baseball”—Uecker appeared on “The Tonight Show” a hundred times or more. After the first couple of times, Ueck was never asked to do a pre-show interview. Carson didn’t want to know what he was going to say. He just knew it would be gold.

Jack Ogden lived a remarkable sports life. In 1918, during his brief time with the New York Giants, he roomed with Jim Thorpe. In 1921, while pitching for the International League’s Baltimore Orioles, he won 31 games. The No. 2 pitcher on that team was a wild and hard-throwing left-handed pitcher called Bob Groves in the papers. Later, he would be known as Lefty Grove.

Ogden returned to the big leagues for a while. He became general manager of the Orioles. He also became manager of the professional football Baltimore Blue Birds. He was basketball coach at the University of Baltimore. He officiated college football games. Then he became a scout. In his long scouting career, he would sign dozens of major league players. He signed Dick Allen.

On Feb. 3, 1956, in a Milwaukee restaurant, Ogden signed a young catcher who had just been discharged from the army at Fort Belvoir. The star of that championship Fort Belvoir team was the shortstop, Dick Groat, who was already a star for the Pirates. But Ogden liked the catcher, particularly his powerful arm.

The catcher, of course, was Bob Uecker.

“The Braves signed me for $3,000,” as Uecker told the story. “That bothered my Dad at the time because he didn’t have that kind of dough. But he wanted me to play. I remember sitting around our kitchen table counting all this money, coins out of jars.”

“Here’s the thing that was easy to miss about Bob,” Bob Costas is saying now. “Above everything else—even above how funny he was—baseball was his life. You had to see this up close to understand it. When he was announcing with the Brewers, he was one of the players. This went beyond even what you would see with beloved announcers like Jack Buck with the Cardinals or Tom Hamilton with Cleveland. They treated Ueck like he was an actual player.

“You know, he had this great arm, and he used to throw batting practice well into his 70s. In 2018, when the Brewers made the run all the way to the National League Championship Series, they voted him a full share (which he donated to charity).

“Baseball kept him alive. Even in his last year, when he was so ill, when he got to the ballpark and stepped on the elevator up to the press box, he would come to life. He was just happier and healthier at the ballpark.”

Bob Uecker was Dick Allen’s best friend—Allen actually cried when Ueck was traded away in ’64.

Bob Uecker was Bob Gibson’s best friend. You probably know about the famous team photograph the Cardinals took in ’64, the one they had to discard because Ueck and Gibby are holding hands and smiling as if they’re a couple.

Bob Uecker was Phil Niekro’s best friend. You’ve no doubt heard Uecker’s famous advice about catching the knuckleball, this after he allowed a record 25 passed balls and 31 wild pitches in just 48 starts, most of them with Niekro on the mound.

“The best way,” he said, “is to wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.”

What often gets overlooked, though, is that Niekro at the time was a struggling 28-year-old pitcher running out of big-league chances. Everybody could see that his knuckleball was dazzling and virtually unhittable, but nobody knew if he could control it enough to pitch in the big leagues. It was Ueck, with no particular skill at catching knuckleballs, who insisted to Niekro, “You keep throwing that knuckleball, throw it again and again and again. You let me worry about catching it. You just keep throwing it.”

“Bob Uecker,” Phil Niekro said, “helped give me my career.”

They all loved him—teammates, opponents, fans, everybody. They loved him for his humor, of course, he was always the funniest person in the room. But they loved him for so much more than that.

“When the Brewers lost to the Mets in the wild card,” Costas says, “Christian Yelich was in tears after the game. He wasn’t in tears because of the loss to the Mets. Bob Uecker was in the clubhouse. And he sensed, as we all did, that this was the last time…”

Bob Costas loved him. In 1994, during a game, the television camera caught a shot of Costas’s son Keith, who was only 8. Joe Morgan said, “Hey, look, Bob, there’s your son Keith.”

At which point, Bob Uecker said, “You know, I was so proud of the kid. I tossed him a baseball. And he dropped it.”

Bob Uecker’s grandest moment as a player probably came with Atlanta on June 21, 1967. Well, it might have been the home run he hit off Sandy Koufax in ’65 (Koufax intentionally walked him later in the game!). It might have been the two home runs he hit off Ray Sadecki in ’66. It might have been the three-hit game he had against the Pirates in ’62 to support Warren Spahn’s fine pitching.

But there was something special about the 1967 moment. That would be his last year in the big leagues; he had already been traded once and would soon be released. He came into Atlanta’s game against San Francisco that day hitting .114. He was bleary-eyed; he had just played all 15 innings in a game against the Dodgers the night before.*

*He did manage a hit in the 10th inning of that game, breaking a long hitless streak. “I turned to the umpire,” he told reporters, “and asked for the ball.”

The Braves started him anyway—their regular catcher, Joe Torre, was injured, and Ueck was the only option—and in the second inning, he came up with Mack Jones on second. He blooped a game-tying double off Joe Gibbon.

In the next inning, Gibbon got in some trouble and was pulled for right-handed reliever Ron Herbel, who has his own big-league distinction—Herbel has the lowest batting average in baseball history for any player with at least 100 plate appearances. Herbel went 6 for 206 in his career; that’s an .029 batting average.

Herbel walked Mack Jones to load the bases. That brought up Bob Uecker. He immediately felt uncomfortable because he was a right-handed hitter and, as such, was almost never used against right-handed pitchers. “About the only time I see right-handed pitchers,” he told reporters, “is in the hotel lobby.”

Herbel threw a pitch. What was the pitch? Uecker was never exactly sure.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “Either I made a mistake hitting it or Herbel made a mistake throwing it, but you can be sure that mistakes were made.”

Uecker smashed it to left-center, where it carried over the 365-foot sign on the wall. It was his first home run in more than a year. It was the first grand slam of his career.

For the rest of his life, Bob Uecker told that story as only Bob Uecker could. “When his manager, Herman Franks, came out to get him,” was the punch line, “he was carrying Herbel’s suitcase.”

But, even better, I like what he said that day. You think of all he did in his life. He was a regular guest on Carson’s “Tonight Show.” He hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He was a star of his own television sitcom. He was two of the greatest announcers in baseball history, first as himself, Bob Uecker, second as Harry Doyle, who called Cleveland games in “Major League.” Juuuuust a bit outside! He’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame, the National Radio Hall of Fame, the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, and even the WWE Hall of Fame.

He was Mr. Baseball, king of the game, the guy who always got seats in the front row. And he was, yes, as beloved as anyone who ever stepped onto a baseball field.

That day, after he hit the grand slam, someone asked him how happy it made him feel. Bob Uecker died on Thursday at age 90. Even still, you can see the deadpan look on his face all those years ago.

“Heck,” he said, “I’m happy when I hit a hard ground ball.”